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The development of modern societies is bound as tightly with the creation and distribution of drugs as the economy is with advances in technology.
Great quote
This was the birth not only of the Merck Company, which still thrives today, but of the modern pharmaceutical industry as a whole. When injections were invented in 1850, there was no stopping the victory parade of morphine. The painkiller was used in the American Civil War of 1861–65 and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Soon morphine fixes were doing the rounds as normal procedure.
The Nazis had their own recipe for healing the people: they promised ideological salvation. For them there could be only one legitimate form of inebriation: the swastika. National Socialism strove for a transcendental state of being as well;
the Nazi world of illusions into which the Germans were to be enticed often used techniques of intoxication.
The myth of Hitler as an anti-drug teetotaler who made his own needs secondary was an essential part of Nazi ideology and was presented again and again by the mass media.
The anti-drug policy served as a vehicle for the exclusion and suppression, even the destruction, of marginal groups and minorities.
It is frightening how familiar many of these terms still sound today. While we have driven out other Nazi verbal monstrosities, the terminology of the war on drugs has lingered. It’s no longer a matter of Jews—the dangerous dealers are now said to be part of different cultural circles.
The extremely political question of whether our bodies belong to us or to a legal-social network of social and health-related interests remains a virulent one even today.
Good old general practitioner Morell, with his cozy harmless air, gave him a sense of security from the very beginning. Morell had no intention of questioning Hitler to genuinely find the root of his health problems. The penetration of the needle was enough for him; it was a substitute for serious medical treatment.
Hitler was delighted by the speed with which his condition improved—usually while the needle was still in his vein.
It was marketed as a kind of counter-drug to replace all drugs, particularly illegal ones. The consumption of this substance was sanctioned. Methamphetamine was regarded as a kind of panacea.
“Pervitin became a sensation,” one psychologist reported. “It soon gained acceptance in a very wide range of circles; students used it as a survival strategy for the exertions of exams; telephone switchboard operators and nurses swallowed it to get through the night shift, and people doing difficult physical or mental labor used it to improve their performance.”
suddenly, unprepared, Germany had to fight a war against the whole of Western Europe. Hitler had maneuvered the Reich into an impossible situation, and his back was against the wall.
That morning Göring was a guest of Hitler’s at the Felsennest. Following the stomach injury that he had received during the storming of the Munich Feldherrenhalle in 1923,
the second most important man in the state had developed a severe morphine addiction.92 Before he left his bedroom, “Möring,” as he was secretly nicknamed, took his craftsman-made syringe with its gold ring out of its light-brown deer-hide case, pulled it open as usual, drew back the sleeve of his green velvet dressing gown as he always did, bound his arm, narrowed his eyes to find the right spot, and gave himself a massive injection.
To approach the truth of Hitler’s drug consumption it helps to imagine the place where he spent most of his time between the summer of 1941 and the autumn of 1944. A search for clues in eastern Poland: colossal exploded bunkers lie like crash-landed concrete spaceships in the light-drenched Masurian Forest. This is the “Wolfsschanze,” the Wolf’s Lair.
This reveals that by now the uppers were not used primarily for storming and conquering, but above all for endurance and survival.30 The tide had turned.
As sick as it might sound: Morell, formerly a popular doctor from the Kurfürstendamm, now with a pharmaceutical empire that he had built out of nothing, used his patients in
the Führer’s headquarters—and in all likelihood Hitler himself—as guinea pigs for dubious hormonal preparations and steroids, produced often enough in disastrously unhygienic conditions, then introduced into the bloodstream by injection. The resulting concoction was released into the Reich and to the Wehrmacht: the autoimmunological downfall.
Did Hitler know something they didn’t? Did he have some kind of miracle weapon up his sleeve that could turn the war around? In fact it was the immediate high of the injections that allowed Hitler to feel like a world ruler and gave him a sense of the strength and unshakable confidence that he needed to make everyone else keep the faith in spite of all the desperate reports coming from every front.
Hitler’s multi-addictive presence replaced any relationship with reality among all the people in his immediate entourage.
Bormann’s unsuccessful attempt to control Morell’s actions:
Morell’s reaction to this bureaucratic attempt to make his activities transparent was as simple as it was startling. He ignored the instructions of the mighty security apparatus and simply didn’t comply, instead continuing as before. In the eye of the hurricane he felt invulnerable, banking on the assumption that Patient A would always protect him.
But what sort of illness was that exactly? Was it really icterus—jaundice? Or might it be a typical kind of junkie hepatitis because Morell wasn’t using properly sterile needles? Hitler, whose syringes were only ever disinfected with alcohol, wasn’t looking well.
His liver, under heavy attack from those many toxic substances over the past few months, was releasing the bile pigment bilirubin: a warning signal that turns skin and eyes yellow.
But what effect was this uncontrolled consumption of multiple drugs having on Hitler’s intellect, on his mind? Was the dictator still compos mentis?
The chemist and author Hermann Römpp wrote that long-term abuse of opiates causes “damage to the character and the will. . . . Intellectual creativity is impaired, although there is no actual loss of earlier intellectual possession. Even the most upstanding characters will not baulk at swindling and deceit.” Paranoia and a morbid mistrust of one’s immediate surroundings also arise.
On this tranquillizing painkiller the Führer was fully in command of himself: this was the true Hitler, and that was how he had always been. The overestimation of his own significance and misjudgment of his opponents were both captured in his blueprint,
Mein Kampf, published in 1925. His opioid addiction only cemented an already existing rigidification, a tendency to delegate violence, and contributed to the fact that in the last phase of the war and in the genocide of the Jews he never once thought of relenting.
He was anything but insane. A classic case of actio libera in causa: he could go on taking as many drugs as he liked to keep himself in a state in which he could commit his crimes. It does not diminish his monstrous guilt.
As fanciful as it seems, in parallel with the laborious efforts to develop a miracle weapon, amid the heavy losses of this final phase, the search for a miracle drug that would turn the tables by chemical means was now operating at full blast.
Hitler ordered nothing less than the complete destruction of Germany: “All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory . . . are to be destroyed.”
Because of a lack of resources this final product of his hatred was never fully realized. The German Reich’s destructive powers were finally spent, and the supplies in Hitler’s medicine cabinet were similarly exhausted.
On April 30, 1945, at about 3:30 p.m., Patient A perished from his own system of repressed reality, overdosing on his own poisonous mixture. His bid to make the world
rise up in a state of total intoxication was condemned to failure from the outset. Germany, land of drugs, of escapism and world-weariness, had been looking for a super-junkie. And it had found him, in its darkest hour, in Adolf Hitler.
